In our last post, we discussed how to communicate with your customers online at the basic, bare minimum. The question remains, how do you take things to the next level in a way that will help your business grow and gain more customers?

The cardinal rule of more advanced communication / interaction is always: Make your customer's life easier. When considering a new feature on your website, ask yourself: "How will this make my customers' lives easier? How will it save them time?" No one wants their life to become more complicated - customers like it when you make their lives easier, that's most likely why they are dealing with you in the first place. For example, if you operate a landscaping and lawn maintenance business, your customers are hiring you because they lack the time or the desire to design and upkeep their lawn. You are making their lives easier by doing it for them.

So, how do you conceptualize what can be added to your website to make your customers' lives easier? It's simpler than you might think! Look at your current business and how you communicate with customers offline, specifically in the actual business portion of things. Try to find offline processes that could be done online to save time. For example, if you run a print shop, you could create a 'Customers Area' to allow them to log in and view / approve proofs of their print jobs, or at a more basic level, you could email them a proof. This saves them from coming to your shop to view proofs. If your business is based around appointments, allow customers to fill out a form on your site requesting an appointment (and providing several back-up options). You can then follow up with them via email, confirming or declining the appointment request. Taking this one step further, you could have a calendar that shows times you have available and allow customers to book an appointment for any available time slot on the calendar.

One Important Caveat

As much as the average person likes to save time, they are also often fearful of change. Changing an offline process to online could cause concern for some customers and scare them away. So be sure to do the following when implementing a new communication tool on your website:

1. Ensure that (at least at first) the new communication tool does not replace the previous method, but only adds it as another option.

2. If you are having trouble convincing existing customers to try the new system, offer a small discount for their first use. If the new tool has been conceptualized and built right, it will save them time - and once they've gotten over the barrier of using it and discovered how it saves time, they won't want to go back to the old method.

3. Before launching a tool in earnest, make it available to a few of your long-time loyal customers. Get their feedback on what they like and what they don't like about the tool. Practical usage will provide more valuable data than any brainstorming session, and this will allow you to hone and refine your tool before making it available to everyone.

Following this simple method will allow you to take your customer communication through your website to the next level, and soon word will spread how you are saving your customers time - and therefore money - and new customers will come to find out why everyone's talking about your business.